Back in some contact, still busy with matters tied to bereavement. Let me say, I have been personally present at a lucid state beatific vision and conversation on passing.

I note, morality is pivotal, indeed take out something objective behind conscience and the voice that urges to truth and right in reasoning, speaking and acting is in effect assigned delusional status.

Not just morality but rationality collapses.

A coherent woldview must be one in which morality is not a delusion, including that conscience is a compass. So, the world root must be an is that grounds ought.

As I have pointed out there is just one serious candidate, the inherently good creator God, a necessary and maximally great being, worthy of loyalty and the responsible, reasonable service of doing good in accord with our evident nature. Such a serious candidate NB will either be impossible as a square circle is, or else is actual, framework to any world existing. Just as no world is possible without distinct contrast thus two-ness. And much more that a light duty keyboard is too little for.

Nothing in that is about irrational fear of punishment, though shame on exposure of wrong is in itself sometimes sharply painful. So, I think some projections on ethical theism by those who reject it, need to be reconsidered. Where cold anger is just as objectionable as hot, cold anger coming out in snide contempt and insistence on dismissive, denigratory caricatures of the other. Too many self-declared atheists I have dealt with over the years are characterised by that sort of cold anger and I think some reconsideration is in order.

1john_a_designerAugust 16, 2017 at 11:47 amThe universe was created instantaneously, which means that everything the world would become was in some sense potentially seeded right at the beginning. There was no plan or purpose behind that?

The purpose of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The purpose of a fertilized human egg is to become a person. If there is purpose there (with oak trees and human beings) isn’t there purpose for the universe as a whole?

The universe did not just come into being for no reason. Who would be foolish enough to defend such a view?

Quote

2Truth Will Set You FreeAugust 16, 2017 at 12:58 pmWhat amazes me is the certainty with which a/mats proclaim “no design” and “no purpose,” as if they know enough to make such a declaration. Agnosticism is, of course, a far more intelligent position than atheism or materialism.

Quote

3john_a_designerAugust 16, 2017 at 1:54 pmFor the life of me, I don’t see how atheistic naturalists/materialists can explain how the universe was created instantaneously. For some reason they keep missing that “little fact.”

Quote

4Truth Will Set You FreeAugust 16, 2017 at 2:25 pmCreated instantaneously out of nothing. Not Lawrence Krauss’s quantum equilibrium version of nothing, but really nothing…as in NO THING.

Also, created instantaneously with the potential to give rise to everything in the universe.

Maybe they should put these people on that game show, "Are You Smarter Than a fifth Grader?".

As for the "purpose" of an acorn - growing into a tree is a property of acorns. Calling that a purpose is just a figure of speech (metaphor?).

As for "created instantaneously" - that's relative to time passing within our "universe"; and that time dimension is part of said "universe". So there might or might not be other dimensions against which it wasn't instantaneous. (I put "universe" in quotes because the literal meaning of that word would include those other dimensions, if they exist. )

Barry is being true to form. I have been commenting as Kenneth Hugh for the last couple of months, none of them getting past moderation. Then I posted the following given the fact that KF obviously lost a close family member.

Quote

kenneth hugh August 16, 2017 at 6:13 pmKF, I know that we have had many disagreements in the past (Acartia, William Spearshake, Tintinnid, Armand Jacks, Ziggy Lorenc, and a few others), but I just wanted to express my sympathy at your loss. Regardless of our differences, we are all, ultimately, part of the same family. I hope to see you back in fighting form soon.

Surprisingly, he actually let it stand and the comment got posted. I subsequently posted a comment simply to thank him. Rather than going to moderation, as I expected it would, it completely disappeared. Banned again.

I’m saying that the current crop of ID lacks explanatory power due to artificially limiting itself to an abstract designer with no defined limitations so it does not exclude God. As such, many aspects of the biosphere simply cannot be explained by ID but can be explained by new-Darwinism. It’s a bad explantion.

Predictions in science are based on the necessary consequences of universal theories about how the world works, in reality, not merely a number of individual experiences of human beings. ID’s designer is abstract and doesn’t “work” in any necessary way because that would exclude a supernatural designer, by definition. There are no necessary consequences to based them on.

For example, take the order of appearance of organisms from least to most complex. New-Darwinism explains this order in that the necessary non-explantory knowege of how to build them was genuinely created over time via a process of variation and criticism. More complicated organisms could not be constructed unless the necessary knowege is present there. However, there are no limits on what the current crop of ID’s designer knows, when it knew it, etc. So, it could have created organisms in any order, including the most complex to least complex or even all at once. At best, on could say “that’s just the order the designer must have wanted”, which explains nothing.

ID is a bad explanation because, despite being carefully designed so it’s designer not necessarily being God, the opposite must necessarily be true: ID’s designer must necesararly defined to not exclude God. Even at the expense of explantory power.

Specially human beings are good explanation for human designed things precisely because of our human limitations.

You mean retract your interpretation of my statement? Why would I do that?

Quote

ID is a bad explanation because, despite being carefully designed so [its] designer [need not necessarily] be God, the opposite [is] necessarily true: ID’s designer must [be] necessarily defined to not exclude God. Even at the expense of explantory power.

I’d even say that a prediction of very little junk in the genome isn’t even a prediction of an abstract supernatural being, as one could always retreat to the claim that said being left junk in the genome “for some good reason we cannot understand.”

IOW, ID’s abstract designer’s lack of necessary is not a feature. It’s a significant detriment. It strips it of the ability to make predictions as necessarily consequences of the theory itself. An abstract designer with no limitations that gets what it want’s for no other reason because it chose that outcome could choose anything logically possible. So, it necessarily predicts nothing, except the absence of logically impossible things. We can more efficiently predict the absences of logically impossible things because, well, they are logically impossible.

Yet, in this thread alone, we have ID proponents claiming ID predicts very little junk in the genome. Why?

Take this comment from ET..

Quote

Why design in a bunch of junk that you then have to design around to get the proper outputs and functionality?

Given that ID’s designer has no defined limitations, why would the designer of the biosphere find it difficult to design around “a bunch of junk” like we currently would? Nor is it even clear that we would in the future. And no one will actually codify that limitation in ID the supposed scientific theory. Why not?

Because everyone knows ID’s designer is God. Not because of what ID says, but because of what it refuses to say.

You mean retract your interpretation of my statement? Why would I do that?

Quote

ID is a bad explanation because, despite being carefully designed so [its] designer [need not necessarily] be God, the opposite [is] necessarily true: ID’s designer must [be] necessarily defined to not exclude God. Even at the expense of explantory power.

I’d even say that a prediction of very little junk in the genome isn’t even a prediction of an abstract supernatural being, as one could always retreat to the claim that said being left junk in the genome “for some good reason we cannot understand.”

IOW, ID’s abstract designer’s lack of necessary is not a feature. It’s a significant detriment. It strips it of the ability to make predictions as necessarily consequences of the theory itself. An abstract designer with no limitations that gets what it want’s for no other reason because it chose that outcome could choose anything logically possible. So, it necessarily predicts nothing, except the absence of logically impossible things. We can more efficiently predict the absences of logically impossible things because, well, they are logically impossible.

Yet, in this thread alone, we have ID proponents claiming ID predicts very little junk in the genome. Why?

Take this comment from ET..

Quote

Why design in a bunch of junk that you then have to design around to get the proper outputs and functionality?

Given that ID’s designer has no defined limitations, why would the designer of the biosphere find it difficult to design around “a bunch of junk” like we currently would? Nor is it even clear that we would in the future. And no one will actually codify that limitation in ID the supposed scientific theory. Why not?

Because everyone knows ID’s designer is God. Not because of what ID says, but because of what it refuses to say.

29ichisanAugust 18, 2017 at 12:17 pmBob and rvb8 are not humans. Their minds have been snatched by evil aliens intent on spreading calumnies, hatred and wars among humans. There are venomous snakes among us. Just saying.

29ichisanAugust 18, 2017 at 12:17 pmBob and rvb8 are not humans. Their minds have been snatched by evil aliens intent on spreading calumnies, hatred and wars among humans. There are venomous snakes among us. Just saying.

In answer to your first question I say, ‘How did God originate from absolute nothig?’

I know He said, ‘I am that I am’, but meaningless tautology only satisfies the credulous.

Your second question begs the retort, ‘couldn’t God have ‘fine tuned’ it a little better? Such flagrant waste of space, and raw materials.’

Your third question seems to forget that upon our deaths we go back to the ‘non-life’ molecules that created, (heh:) us. The faxt that we know our ‘ingredients’, and where those ‘ingredients’ originated, (stars), suggests atheists understand this question far better than the religious.

Your nest two questions are similar and I will answer both at once; the science and research is on going, the results are amazing, and the science is wonderful. As IDers sit baxk and twiddle their thumbs at the jaw dropping complexity of life, scientists are busily unravelling this complexity and reaching amazing conclusions; nowhere in their research is ‘supernaturalism’ even vaguely thought of as a process worhty of investigation. That is because, and I can’t stress this enough, SUPERNATURALISM, IS, UNTESTIBLE BECAUSE IT IS BY DEFINITION BEYOND NATURE!

You conclude with your own silly invention, ‘naturalist miracles’ Ah-huh; try understanding the word ‘oxymoron’, and that takes care of that.

Quote

19ichisanAugust 19, 2017 at 2:17 amrvb8: I know He said, ‘I am that I am’, but meaningless tautology only satisfies the credulous.

I knew it. rvb8 is a demon just as I thought. LOL.

Quote

20rvb8August 19, 2017 at 3:13 amichisan @19,

I’m not a demon as I place demons in the same category as God; divine, above nature, non-corporeal.

Because I don’t accept anything can exist beyond the ‘natural’ universe then ‘demons’ also fall into the fictional world of the supernatural.

Given some guilt by association rhetoric above, I think a reminder from earlier this year may help us balance thinking — and those who could imagine (on years of track record) that Antifa is a peaceful, legitimate protest movement are at best naive: